The Meraki MR58 features three 802.11n radios, a weatherproof case, and a …

Plucky Meraki, a San Francisco mesh networking startup, is stepping up to play with the big boys with the introduction of its $1,499 MR58 WiFi router. Designed for outdoor use, the MR58 has three separate 802.11n radios each of which can be used for front-end networks or backhaul, while meshing with nearby networks. Both omnidirectional and directional antennas can be separately used with each radio.

Comparable products from competitors list for $5,000 (street, over $3,000) not including back-end management hardware, and lack the 802.11n support for distance and throughput.

Founder Sanjit Biswas said in an interview that the new router would be used in "high-end hospitality and apartment complexes as well as educational campuses of all sizes." As bandwidth demands have grown in all three kinds of venues, Biswas said, "They're looking for something that can help them deliver something like the backhaul of a DS3 or FiOS connection."

"A large fraction of our customers are really not doing outdoor deployments, as much as they are trying to cover their apartment complex or hotel, or create a hotzone," he said. Biswas also noted that as students move from college to apartments, they expect far more from the Internet than preceding waves.

The MR58 can be used to cover outdoor spaces with high-speed backhaul, or one or more radios can be used for directional point-to-point links of 1 to 20km. The unit supports 802.1af power over Ethernet, consuming less than 8 watts of power at maximum. Meraki has three Atheros 2x2 MIMO radios in a weatherproof case rated at -20� C to 50� C. Meraki sells antennas, but the radios have standard N-type connectors for third-party attachment.

The MR58 works with Meraki's existing software-as-a-service management system, just as do the several other models of indoor and outdoor routers the company sells.

Biswas says that Meraki products tend to hit a sweet spot for venues and organizations that need extensive coverage and high throughput but don't have the in-house staff or time to build enterprise-grade networks. "Products in the market right now are designed with the typical enterprise IT staff in mind," he said.

This move puts Meraki directly in competition with several established metro-scale WiFi equipment makers, including BelAir Networks and Tropos Networks. However, the market for municipal WiFi has shifted so much since developments crested and crashed in mid-2007 that Meraki may have a market somewhat to itself. (See "Second wind for muni WiFi?", November 17, 2008.)

BelAir has remained the strongest metro-scale outdoor WiFi vendor, with thousand of its nodes in use in USI Wireless's Minneapolis city-wide public access/municipal services network, and in Cablevision's Northeast US WiFi network intended only for its cable broadband subscribers. Tropos, by contrast, has had its largest deployments in pure public safety and municipal worker access, such as the several hundred square mile network in Oklahoma City built using its routers.

All three firms also require separate management systems on top of their hardware. Meraki sells each product with management services. The flipside: there's no way to use Meraki's system without relying on its backend for configuration, access, and monitoring.

Meraki's mesh technology uses a modified WiFi protocol to allow dynamic formation of node mesh clusters, while allowing bandwidth injection from upstream networks or broadband connections at any node. Standard WiFi clients connect to the nodes with no modification.

Meraki, started by MIT graduate students out of the MIT Roofnet project, first sold tiny $50 802.11g routers designed to self-organize over relatively short distances to build simple indoor networks across buildings.

The company, which has Google as one of its investors, expanded into low-power outdoor units, and bumped its prices up as it moved from providing resources to community networking groups that needed little support to focusing nearly entirely on hotzone, hotel, apartment building, and corporate networking. Meraki's products are also used in the developing world for city-wide WiFi and other purposes.

The MR58, for instance, will be used by Babylon (Long Island), New York to equip a range of dozens of beaches with WiFi services tapping into fiber-optic connections for backhaul. Biswas said, "They have MR58s connecting each of the sites themselves, they have directional links for that, and it's all backhauled by the city's metro link."

Meraki's move should drop the cost for outdoor deployment while improving bandwidth availability. It's been a long wait for outdoor 802.11n gear designed for this purpose to hit the market. Atheros first introduced its outdoor 802.11n designs back in second quarter 2007.